EMC on Monday introduced EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), which it said provides the flexibility and scalability of public storage clouds but with private cloud security, and showed the second generation of its ViPR software-defined storage technology.

EMC aims to get a jump on the virtualized storage movement with Project Liberty, a software-defined version of its VNX array that can run in hosted or cloud environments or perhaps on commodity hardware.

EMC's disparate data protection technologies including NetWorker, Avamar, Mozy, Data Domain, and VPLEX all get enhancements to make them ready for multi-tenant, cloud, and software-defined environments, and to work better with each other.

Symantec is returning to an aggressive growth mindset across the company and creating a deeper focus on product innovation and bringing products to market, said Symantec COO Stephen Gillett, in an interview with CRN on Friday, just a day after the company ousted its former CEO Steve Bennett.

While VMware's Project Mystic strategy of combining compute, storage and networking resources into a single software offering seems aimed at the heart of hyper-converged infrastructure technology developers, those developers say the real impact will be in bringing welcomed attention to technology.

XChange Solution Provider 2015 is finally upon us and the timing couldn't be better. The premier channel event is happening March 1-3 in Dallas, bringing together 225 solution provider decision makers from across North America. CRN is at the event to provide news, analysis and a firsthand take from partners.